Hundreds Gather at the Stonewall Inn to Show Solidarity With Orlando

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Where there’s one, there’s more, went the Facebook post, linking to a Los Angeles Times piece about a man arrested yesterday with a carful of deadly weapons en route to the L.A. gay pride parade. “If you’re coming to Stonewall tonight, please be careful.”

The author was referring, of course, to the Stonewall Inn, site of the historic 1969 riots widely regarded as this country’s first major gay civil rights protest. Yesterday evening the bar was also the setting of a vigil hastily organized to honor the 50 dead and 53 injured after Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American man who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, opened fire with an assault rifle on Pulse, an Orlando, Florida, nightclub where members of the LGTBQ community had gathered to celebrate Pride month.

In a year chockablock with nightmarish mass shootings, Sunday brought the deadliest yet, the worst gun massacre in the history of the U.S. Gathering publicly suddenly seemed riskier than ever.

That concern wasn’t lost on me. As the subway I’d boarded in Brooklyn crept closer and closer to lower Manhattan, I couldn’t help but side-eye the smattering of other riders, several of whom regarded me with similar wariness. Then, as if he could sense our collective unease, a man carrying a duffel bag grew visibly agitated. “Faggots!” he screamed, darting to the other end of the car. “Fucking faggots!”

In the West Village, the weather was lovely and people went about their business. “What’s going on?” asked one well-coiffed lady toting a Vince shopping bag and strolling down Waverly Place. “They have a peaceful protest over there,” a second lady replied, pointing down the block.

Thirty minutes before the official start of the event, a decent crowd (including plenty of police officers, bomb-sniffing dogs, and news media) had already assembled in front of Stonewall’s wooden doors on Christopher Street. More vigil-goers were inside drinking in the dark. Against the wall of the building there was a small but growing shrine: a line of long-stem roses, a cluster of bouquets, and candles. A sign read: “You can take my life, but you won’t stop our voice.” Another decreed: “Never stop dancing.”

“As a small-town gay boy who moved as close to the city as possible, this is home,” said Quincy Bell, a native Floridian who now lives in New Jersey. “This is a place where I feel a sense of community the most.”

Bell was wearing a shirt that read: “Some dudes marry dudes. Get over it.” He was there with a friend, Cecil Wilder, also from New Jersey. Wilder’s eyes periodically welled over with tears as we spoke. “Each city has its place where you congregate. For some people it would be church. For gays in New York City, it’s Stonewall.”

“We’ve had countless discussions about it,” added her wife. “If somebody has a shotgun or a knife, they don’t eliminate 50 lives in 20 minutes.”

The couple came to Stonewall straight from the airport, where Rachel, who spoke with a British accent, had just landed from Manchester, England. “The flight was seven hours,” Jennifer said. “The cats would be happy to see her, but we just had to be here.”

Stonewall is where they’d gathered in the past to celebrate, and they were determinedly brave about being there yesterday. “You gotta keep living,” said Jennifer. “That’s exactly what they want—for you to be afraid. Go about your day; celebrate the lives and how far we’ve come.”

“It’s just sad that we’re here now,” Rachel said quietly, “when the last time we were here [we were] celebrating the marriage equality victories.”

There was a palpable sense in the crowd that the events in Orlando were a reaction against LGBTQ civil rights triumphs of recent years. “You think things are changed, you think they’re better, and they’re not,” remarked Mitchell Davis, a trans man in his 40s who came with his wife and two young children. “You think you’ve gone somewhere, and as soon as we do, there’s this backlash that’s wicked and evil.”

It was bedtime for their kids: Their daughter was fast asleep in her stroller, clutching a packet of fruit snacks; their son, clad in camo pants, was totally wired. “He wants to invent a gun that turns all bad guys into good guys,” his mother said. “We’re trying to say it might be better if it’s not a gun at all.”

They came to Stonewall, Davis told me, because they wanted to instill a sense of the value of community: “We told the kids we wanted to be with a bunch of other people who are all feeling sad together. Knowing that together we’re strong, together we have power, together our sadness can turn into something positive. And that love conquers everything.”

That message was reaffirmed by the evening’s many speakers, who preached with righteous anger to hundreds from the steps of the townhouse adjacent to the bar. Orlando, they agreed, was very much a hate crime. They spoke of going forward in love, triumphing over hate, fighting back, of the need for “safe spaces” throughout the country, like Stonewall is, like Pulse should have been. (That sentiment was eerily reinforced by the sign that hung over the makeshift dais: “Nest Seekers,” it read, advertising the real estate brokerage that operates out of the townhouse’s retail level.)

The crowd, at least those who could hear, cheered ecstatically along to the speeches. Only when activist Mirna Haidar took the stage did a chord of dissent sound. “I’m Muslim and gender non-conforming,” Haidar introduced herself. “This is not a Muslim issue; it’s a hate issue. It’s a gun violence issue. It’s really not a Muslim issue at all.”

“Yes it is!” came the shrill reply of a single heckler. Within seconds the crowd shouted him down with chants of “No hate! No hate!” When Haidar descended the steps, a scrum of people approached, seeking hugs.

“Not all Americans are haters,” former New York State senator Tom Duane, among the most powerful—and audible—of the speakers, later declared. “We knew that there would be a backlash because of the advancements of our civil rights. And we’re seeing it happen, but we cannot go back; we have to keep going forward.”

Long before the sun set, the vigil was over. Protestors spoke of another event at Union Square. People began to disperse. Moving through the crowd, I heard snippets of conversation. “I don’t like this echoing thing,” an older man groused about the call and response refrains bubbling up irrepressibly among a segment of the crowd. “It’s an Occupy Wall Street thing,” a friend explained.